Chapter 86: For Sale, One Million to Start

[System Notice: You have terminated your Warden’s Mandate bond with TidalBlade.]

[System Notice: Warden’s Mandate successfully activated on the Starborn legendary hero Lyra]

Congratulations! You have obtained the Legendary companion [Lyra, the Starbow]!

Two notifications chimed in Kael’s ear, clean and bright as struck crystal.

On Alexis Kane’s forehead, the golden mark of the contract came apart. It unspooled into threads of light, drifted upward, and faded into nothing.

She felt the tether go.

It was a strange thing, losing a connection she had never asked for. For a moment, something hollow opened beneath her ribs. She should have been elated.

She had broken the bond and walked free of his absolute command, and that was everything she had wanted.

So why did it feel like standing in an empty room?

Her gaze drifted past Kael’s shoulder. There, where her own mark had been, a new one was taking shape on another woman’s forehead.

Gold light gathered and condensed and settled into place on the brow of the Starborn archer, and the hollow in Alexis’s chest sharpened into something with edges.

It felt like theft. As though something that ought to have been hers had been quietly lifted out of her hands by a woman too beautiful to be real.

Her mouth tightened. Her eyes went dark.

Kael noticed at once. She wore the face of someone who had just been told she was owed a fortune and handed nothing. He lifted an eyebrow.

"What’s wrong?" he asked. "I cut the contract. You should be pleased."

"Who’s unhappy?" The reply came a little too fast. "I’m thrilled."

She glanced at the archer standing behind him, and when she spoke again, the sweetness in her voice was thin enough to see through.

"Congratulations on the new companion. High rank, excellent stats." She paused. "And breathtaking, too. It must make grinding together every day so much more pleasant."

"It’s fine." Kael laughed, easy and unbothered. "Lyraen’s attributes are formidable. She’ll be very useful."

He was plainly pleased. The grin on his face was open and warm, and that was precisely what made the fire in Alexis’s chest flare a degree hotter. She had no name for it. She didn’t want one.

She gave a short, cool exhale through her nose."If that’s all, I’m going back to grind."

She turned to go.

"Wait." His voice stopped her at the edge of the road. "There’s something I actually need to ask you."

She looked back over her shoulder. "What is it?"

"It’s not a big thing." Kael tilted his head. "Over the last few days, I’ve located several wild territories. I’m fairly sure a number of guilds will want them."

Alexis said nothing.

"The problem is time. I don’t have enough of it to haggle with every buyer." His gaze settled on her, level and unhurried.

"So I want you to sell them for me. When the deals close, you take ten percent of the proceeds. Or, if you’d rather, you pick one of the territories as your payment."

Alexis went still."Wild territories?"

The flatness in her face had gone. Interest flickered up in its place, quick and sharp.

It made perfect sense that she would react that way. Evertide had been the second player guild founded on the entire server.

They had been recruiting hard for days, and the numbers were already respectable. The next obstacle was obvious. A guild without a headquarters was a guild without a future.

Building one from scratch was slow and expensive, and in the end, you could only staff it with the most basic human recruits. The better path was to seize a wild stronghold and inherit whatever lived there.

But those strongholds were rare. They sat deep in high-level zones, far from the beaten roads, and almost no one had found them.

Alexis had tried. Over the last two days, she had paid information brokers good money for the coordinates of several wild territories.

Every one had been a disappointment. Low-level, half-ruined, home to weak races with almost no room to grow. She hadn’t even bothered to send an expedition.

The only option left had been to keep paying scouts to dig.And now Kael was telling her he had several.

"What level?" Curiosity cracked through her restraint. "Which races live there?"

Kael didn’t answer. He lifted a hand and opened the chat interface, and a stack of annotated maps spilled across her vision, one after another, each marked with coordinates and detailed notes.

Alexis stared.

"Level Three..." she said slowly. "Level Three, Level Three..." Her voice dropped. "Level Four?"

Her eyes moved faster. They stopped on one map and widened."The giants. There are actual giants in Giantsrest Vale."

Her breath came shallow and quick. Her hand rose halfway to her mouth, and she seemed barely aware of it.

She had every reason to be stunned. Kael had picked these territories for one purpose: the resource stockpiles locked inside them, which he meant to carry back to Ebonreach and pour into its upgrade.

So he had skipped every low-level outpost and gone only for the rich ones, Level Three and above.

The scale of the territories, and the races inside them, dwarfed anything Alexis had managed to find in two days of searching.

Several of them, all at once, in a single stroke.

It took her a long moment to steady herself. When she finally looked up, the disbelief in her face was naked.

"How did you find so many?"

"I have my methods." Kael’s smile was light and closed. "You don’t need to know them."

He could hardly tell her the truth. That he had died once and come back.

That every coordinate on those maps had been pulled from memory, from a life in which these territories had made and broken entire guilds.

"Find buyers," he said. "Open at one million gold coins per territory. No lower."

"One million?" Alexis stared at him. "Kael, these are very good territories. The races in them are exceptional.

But if you’re only selling the coordinates, nobody will pay that. It’s too much.""I don’t think you understand what I’m selling."

He said it gently, almost kindly.

"I’m not selling coordinates. I’ve already taken these territories. They are mine, garrisons and all." He paused.

"Any guild that wants one has two choices. They can pay me, or they can try to take it from me."

It landed in a single heartbeat.

"You’re monopolizing the resource," Alexis breathed. Her eyes snapped to his.

"And if they refuse? If they decide to find the coordinates themselves, and then march on you? That’s an entire server of guilds, Kael. Can you hold off all of them alone?"

"If they don’t want to pay," Kael said, "they’re free to attack."

He shrugged, with perfect, maddening calm.

"As long as they’re prepared for the consequences."